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The Body and Me

Injury. How it changes life. How the inner energy changes. How something that has always felt like the greatest Blessing God ever gave, turns into to something that brings a sense of pain and loss of something deeply treasured. I know all the Yogi pat responses. “Injuries are part of the practice.” “Modify.” “What can you learn from this?”

How can anyone object to the wisdom of any of these responses? Yet when you’re in it, none of them are a comfort. It’s just you and your body, and somehow the physical pain and the emotional loss of ability, the loss of hard earned freedom (which is a loss I choose to believe is temporary) just fucking hurts. Not just in my right knee. In my whole fucking heart.

I practiced in silence alone at the park. Grateful for the yoga I can still do. A heat pack on the knee gave greater ability, until it didn’t. I noticed I practiced with infinitely more care with this injury, watchful for any hint of strain, and I found a weak link, that I likely wouldn’t have discovered without injury prompting investigation. Warrior 1. Turning that back foot in just a bit more relieved a lot of knee tension.

Does that solve everything? Nope. Jump throughs and seated jump backs are thoroughly fucked . But I did find (from the seated position) that if I roll on my right hip and let my left (non injured) knee push down on my right (thoroughly fucked) knee, it protected the injured meniscus area and kept it completely out of pain. It’s not a jump back. It’s just a way back.

Someone recommended getting a custom insole to protect the knee, so today I got measured for one. It was pricey. The Yogi who recommended it, said it saved him from surgery. It will be weeks before it arrives. The insole won’t help me in the actual practice practice, as I don’t wear shoes in the practice, but it may help correct an uneven distribution of weight on my feet and that may help the knee. In a mild practice, I don’t feel pain until I am walking/limping out of the park.

One more thing, imaginary readers, . . . . Something in all of this was actually Beautiful too, and it’s regrettable to only mention this now as no one is ever going to read this much of my 1st world yoga sulking, but here’s the Beauty . . .

At the Park, the body and me really bonded with each other. We’re both working through something, trying to keep something alive and growing, something we both love very very much. The body talked to me as I tried different approaches. We bonded. I became much more aware and much more grateful for abilities I had begun to take for granted. This body and me have worked hard, had fun and we LOVE THIS. Want to keep it, and we want to keep growing, all the days of our Long Well Lives. Our dream is to have a life of just yoga, and grow in the practice, every day, until we are 111 years young. Namaste.

1. RETURN: Return to whatever dream, if it happened, would fill you up, and make you happy. But really imagine it happening. Is it the work that makes you happy in and of itself, or is it the recognition, the pay-off? What work makes you happy, all by itself? What feels good? If we don’t know what that is, that’s ok. At least we’re opening the door of wonder, to find out.

2. FEAR: We’re afraid to try again because we’re looking at it wrong. Let’s say you starred in your own film, won an Oscar, and I won a Pulitzer for my stuff. Now what? Pressure’s on. Are you a one hit wonder? Am I? There are expectations now. Let’s say we get a few successes, get used to that, but what then? Will it be a lifelong success, or will we fall out of fashion? Become has-beens? Is that less terrifying than being a never-was?

You and I are wrong to think our dreams are broken because our last efforts didn’t turn out the way we’d hoped. There is no finish line, no Destination except this moment; no ending point, except our last breath. Every time we try and hope for something, its always going to be the same risk. Doesn’t matter if the last thing failed or succeeded. The next thing will be just as risky. The same is true for everyone who tries for a dream, at any time at any age.

3. THE NATURE OF TRUE DREAMS: If our dreams are age restrictive, they’re not true dreams. You wanted to be an A-list actor before you were 30, and I wanted my novel to be a best-seller by that time. The reason these dreams weren’t real, is they had a finishline, a delusion disguised as hope that said, “When I hit THIS I’ve made it!

But like the #2 Fear paragraph says, there is no “made it!” No finishline that makes everything great, forever. Success can even increase pressure and fear. So if we still want those same things, if those really are our dreams, we need to change them up in our minds to be True Dreams. A true actor’s dream might be: I’m going to give my all to be the best actor I can be; I will devote the rest of my life to improving my craft to give all that I can.

Who can take that dream away? Who can stop us from doing that at any age? That is a dream independent of circumstance and industry, reliant only upon our Devotion. That is a lifelong mission statement. With that lifelong mission statement, whether failure or success comes, it won’t derail us.

Both success and failure are great at derailing dreamers. Look how many die at the top. Even if success lasted the rest of your life or mine, the fulfillment it brought would leave, unless the work is fulfilling, in and of itself, which takes us back to paragraph #1 RETURN.

That’s why we need to define that True dream, the work that is fulfilling all by itself, and that lifelong mission statement, that is independent of success and failure.

Success and Failure are ripples on a pond. But the True Dream, the Lifelong Mission Statement, is the Pond. We need the pond, not the ripples that come and go.